1938: THE WHITE STAG by Kate Seredy
Old Nimrod, Mighty Hunter before the Lord, leaned wearily against the stones of the sacrificial altar.
In previous installments of Newburied, I’ve talked about “mythology” in genre fiction before, which is my shorthand for, basically, worldbuilding and explaining things like hard and soft magic systems. Harry Potter, the side project of right-wing blogger Joanne Katherine Rowling that I used as a comparison point for The View From Saturday, had a mythology where there was a whole world of wizards WHO ALL SUBSCRIBED COMPLETELY TO TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES and they had their own school with a seven-year curriculum AND NO GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOMS and that wizarding world had a history of heroes and villains and epic battles INVOLVING PEOPLE WHO WERE ONLY FULLY MALE OR FULLY FEMALE, you get the idea. Brandon Sanderson, whose fantasy epics like Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive I used as a comparison point for The Hero And The Crown, also built the complex world of the Cosmere with a multi-layered backstory and history and multiple extremely detailed magic systems. Frank Herbert wrote Dune, his saga of Space Cocaine and Space Islam, with an absurd 10,000-year backstory, much of which doesn’t even make the body of his novel and instead gets placed in winding appendices (artificial intelligence almost threatened to take over the world so mankind had to go to war with the machines and eventually won, and that was thousands of years before the actual plot of Dune happens, and you don’t ever get that story unless you read appendix II of the first Dune novel!). Three quick examples of writers that each invented their own mythologies for their fantasy worlds. And I like reading genre fiction because I love seeing the crazy things that these writers can think up, and how complex they can make their world, and how they can play with concepts like history and memory in developing their characters and settings. But there’s another aspect of mythology I haven’t really dived into yet in Newburied: actual, literal mythology.
Kate Seredy’s foreword to her short 1938 Newbery medalist The White Stag opens with her account of reading a contemporary book of Hungarian history and nearly falling asleep:
“Turning the pages I felt as if I were walking in a typical twentieth-century city, a city laid out in measured blocks, glaring with the merciless white light of knowledge, its streets smooth, hard concrete facts. One could not stumble on streets like that, nor could one ever get lost; every corner is so plainly marked with dates.”
Seredy wanted to write a book that, bluntly, children would not find boring. And she cared about Hungarian history, so what she landed on were the ancient Hungarian myths of Nimrod and Hadur and the Huns and Magyars and, ultimately, the rise of Attila:
“Those who want to hear the voice of pagan gods in wind and thunder, who want to see fairies dance in the moonlight, who can believe that faith can move mountains, can follow the thread on the pages of this book. It is a fragile thread; it cannot bear the weight of facts and dates.”
Now, there’s something to what Seredy writes here. It would obviously be too sweeping a statement to say “history is boring and mythology is cool”, but that phrase would be an accurate reflection of my interests as a child. And I’ll talk about the works of mythology that I grew up reading in a minute, but I will say that Seredy’s book doesn’t grab me as an adult. It was a fast enough read but a largely forgettable one; the one notable part was a pretty badass description of this furious Child Attila riding into battle for the first time, and the man Bendeguz who raised Attila to be heartless from an early age:
“Survivors of battles and escaped prisoners whispered strange tales, tales which struck terror into the hearts of listeners. Tales about the man Bendeguz who knew no pity and would tolerate none; Bendeguz whose face was stone, whose eyes were ice, and who would ride into the most frightful slaughters always without a sword, without armor, carrying a small child on his shoulders. Later there were tales about Attila, the child, whose narrow slanting amber-colored eyes were like the eyes of an eagle, who, always in the van riding a coal-black horse, laughed at death, for death was powerless against him; Attila whose shrill voice rang out above the tumult of thousands like the scream of an eagle.”
Come on, that’s awesome. A baby riding into the battle on the general’s shoulder and screaming and terrifying everyone? And Seredy even has an illustration of that?
That language, that image, that’s not something you usually find in history books when you’re a child, but you find it all the time in ancient myths. And if you were a big dork like me, you had plenty of books of ancient myths lying around.
Last year I saw someone at the playground wearing a shirt with the cover art for D’Aulaire’s Book Of Greek Myths and I had to walk up to them and say “your shirt rules.” The volume by the husband-and-wife team of Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, themselves recipients of the Caldecott Medal (Newbery for picture books) and Regina Medal (Newbery for Catholics) at different points in their career, has been every child’s introduction to the myths of antiquity since 1962. It is still in print and the audiobook is read by Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Kathleen Turner, and Matthew Broderick.
Helen Britt’s Ye Gods!, published in 1989 was the mythology textbook for my Latin 1 class freshman year of high school, and our primary resource as the second-ranked team in the North Suburban Certamen League, which was the league of prep schools in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs that fielded “Latin teams” to basically play Jeopardy! against each other but with questions only about Roman history, obscure mythology, and verb conjugations. Presumably, every participant in the NSCL skipped at least one Homecoming dance. But all of this pales in comparison to the grandmother of them all.
Hamilton’s Mythology1, published in 1942, gifted to me as a paperback by my mother when I was a child, and still sitting on my shelf today. Honorary Citizen of Athens Edith Hamilton created the definitive work for every seventh or eighth grader who wanted to learn who Zeus was. Greek myths - which make up the bulk of Hamilton’s book although there are a few nods to other mythological traditions - are, of course, wild stories that are easy to love, as she outlines in her introduction:
“The real interest of the myths is that they lead us back to a time when the world was young and people had a connection with the earth, with trees and seas and flowers and hills, unlike anything we ourselves can feel. When the stories were being shaped, we are given to understand, little distinction has as yet been made between the real and the unreal. The imagination was vividly alive and not checked by reason, so that anyone in the woods might see through the trees a fleeing nymph, or bending over a clear pool to drink, behold in the depths a naiad's face.”
Obviously, the fantastical elements of these stories draw nerdy children in very easily, but there’s more to mythology than that. There are gods and monsters and heroes, yes, and kids with vivid imaginations will get into those quickly, but the world of Greek mythology was still a world that was very human. That is, everything had flaws. There were monsters, but monsters could be tricked. There were heroes, but every hero had a fatal weakness. There were gods, but the gods were all horny. And the humanity of the gods especially is what set the Greek myths apart from the other ancient religions:
“The Greeks made their gods in their own image. That had not entered the mind of man before. Until then, gods had had no semblance of reality. They were unlike all living things. In Egypt, a towering colossus, immobile, beyond the power of the imagination to endow with movement, as fixed in the stone as the tremendous temple columns, a representation of the human shape deliberately made unhuman. Or a rigid figure, a woman with a cat's head suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty. Or a monstrous, mysterious sphinx, aloof from all that lives.”
Getting judged by Anubis, putting your heart on the scale, is scary. But getting judged by Zeus is not that scary because you know he’s going to either be drunk off of his ass or distracted by the sexy lady walking by. And that makes Zeus a comedic character in a way that other gods from other traditions weren’t. And that gave these stories fun, gripping narrative elements that other stories didn’t have, elements that, if you were a child reading Hamilton’s book, would blow you away with how funny and unique and and unexpected they were. And most importantly, you learned from these stories that the gods themselves were nothing to be afraid of:
“Human gods naturally made heaven a pleasantly familiar place. The Greeks felt at home in it. They knew just what the divine inhabitants did there, what they ate and drank and where they banqueted and how they amused themselves. Of course they were to be feared; they were very powerful and very dangerous when angry. Still, with proper care a man could be quite fairly at ease with them. He was even perfectly free to laugh at them…That is the miracle of Greek mythology - a humanized world, men freed from the paralyzing fear of an omnipotent Unknown. The terrifying incomprehensibilities which were worshiped elsewhere, and the fearsome spirits with which earth, air, and sea swarmed, were banned from Greece.”
If the gods are nothing to be afraid of, basically nothing else is worth being afraid of either. If you can laugh at the forces that created the world - or we don’t even have to go that far, if you could identify with the forces that created the world, if you could recognize the same flaws in those forces that you had in yourself - you could teach yourself not to be afraid of other seemingly all-powerful authorities in your life. You could recognize that you didn’t have to accept things as gospel just because the right person with the right title said it, because if a god could be wrong or could be an idiot, well, this person right in front of you isn’t even a god. It goes back to a very early Newburied essay about folk tales: you hear one story about a clever poor person outwitting the king, and the king never looks the same to you again.
Hamilton’s Mythology was on the list of books I read to both of my newborn daughters as we sat in the glider at 3am, although I did not have such lofty goals as “imprint upon my children that authority is a lie that requires our consent to continue”. They were just good stories and good for reading in a quiet voice and putting kids to sleep (and, honestly, hornier than I remembered so maybe I shouldn’t have read them). But there’s a reason kids love myths, there’s a draw there that you can’t find on the grid system of history, in the merciless white light of knowledge. We need to learn from history, but we need the stories, too, to understand just how far from history we can bring ourselves.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2002 medalist, A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park.
[Lin-Manuel Miranda singing “Alexander Hamilton” voice]Hamilton's Mythology!